This article was co-authored with Dr. Justin Bell, Assistant Research Scientist at Chestnut Health Systems, first author on the underlying study, and a specialist in addiction recovery.
Over 29.3 million Americans consider themselves in recovery from drug addiction. Some return to drugs, but some recover long-term. Once people hit five years in recovery, then, according to the NIAAA, the risk of returning to addiction drops dramatically, even to that of the general population.
Who gets to five years? Where does their success come from?
To find out, we ran a 6-month study of 132 people who were mostly in long-term recovery. We focused on something rarely examined in addiction research: beliefs about the world itself. Psychologists call these primal world beliefs: our most basic assumptions about what kind of world we live in. Most primal world beliefs boil down into three main ones: the belief that the world is Safe (versus dangerous), Enticing (versus ugly and boring), and Alive (versus cold and mechanistic).
In our study, we measured these three primal world beliefs and their ability to promote recovery capital.
Recovery capital is important in the study of addiction recovery because people rarely recover from addiction alone. Most of us need help. Recovery capital refers to all the internal and external resources to sustain recovery: friends, hope, purpose, parents, etc.
Over the six-month study, three key findings emerged, each revealing a different way our worldview can shape recovery:
Safe world belief didn’t matter as much as we thought.
We expected that people who saw the world as safe and secure would report more recovery resources. While there was a slight connection, it was weaker than anticipated. Feeling safe may be more important early on, when people are just getting stabilized, but it didn’t appear to drive long-term recovery strength in this study.
Alive world belief boosted the power of spirituality.
Alive is the belief that events in the world happen according to a broader intention that is interacting with you and needs your help for an important task. This belief wasn’t directly tied to recovery resources on its own. Instead, among people who engaged in spiritual practices like prayer or meditation, those high in Alive saw greater benefits. These individuals weren’t necessarily more religious, but they tended to see the world as Alive.
In other words, when it comes to addiction recovery, it’s not really about being religious; it’s about whether you believe the world is awake, alive, and reaching back.
Most importantly, the Enticing world belief was the strongest predictor of recovery capital.
Enticing reflects a belief that the world is full of beautiful, fascinating, meaningful things, where something valuable might be found in every person, place, or experience. In our study, this belief had the strongest association with recovery capital. On a scale from 0 to 5, most people score around 3.6 on Enticing. But participants in long-term recovery averaged 4.01.
This is higher than almost any group that these primal world belief researchers had ever seen.
Theoretically, all primal world beliefs act like lenses that shape how we interpret everything around us. If so, those low on Enticing will interpret day-to-day experiences as being more dull and ugly, where exploration offers little return. But those high on Enticing see beauty and value around the corner.
They are more extraverted, assuming value in each new stranger. They are more curious, assuming value in each new factoid.
In the context of recovery, my co-authors and I suspect that seeing the world as Enticing may help people notice opportunities for recovery and support, assuming value in the world around them. It may also influence how they interpret treatment or recovery meetings, viewing them as a source of hope rather than burdensome, and sustaining their curiosity and motivation throughout the long process of healing.
If world beliefs matter, how do we change them?
The implications of these findings for treatment are enormous. Treatment today tends to focus on beliefs about the self, neglecting what people believe about the world.
Some recent studies have demonstrated that beliefs like Enticing can be changed. For example, psychologist Janna Hämpke and colleagues were able to increase the Enticing world belief in high schoolers through a brief nine-day intervention. The effects were temporary but promising, suggesting that even brief exposures to ways the world is often full of curiosity, beauty, and awe might shift how people see the world around them.
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A takeaway for everyone
If recovery is a process of connection and escaping isolation, then cultivating a view of the world as Enticing and Alive can help anyone, not just those with addiction problems.
Many of us feel lonely, disconnected, or lost in a world that doesn’t seem to have a place for us. You don’t have to wait for hardship to begin making a change. You can start by taking a quiz to find out your own primal world beliefs, and then begin noticing what you notice in two steps. First, pay attention to what draws your curiosity, who makes you feel connected, and where you find beauty. Second, realize that these are not isolated, rare phenomena, but everywhere, all the time.
These small moments of engagement may be the first steps toward seeing the world in a whole new way.